On Mars, InSight will pursue three main goals: taking the planet’s temperature, measuring its size, and monitoring for Mars quakes. Scientists at NASA say this work is kind of like giving the red planet a “checkup.”

Here’s what the roughly $US828 million mission could accomplish.

It took about six months for the InSight lander to travel 301 million miles from southern California to Mars.

NASA launched InSight from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on May 5.

The rocket weighed about 730,000 pounds once it was ready for blastoff (including the fuel and payload).

InSight landed on Mars at approximately 7am AEDT Tuesday morning.

The last minutes of its journey to the Martian surface were the trickiest. The lander had to slow down from around 12,500 miles per hour to 5 miles per hour in just seven minutes.

NASA-JPL Caltech-Lockheed Martin

InSight used a parachute and fired thrusters to slow itself down as it approached the red planet. The legs of the machine also functioned as shock absorbers.

InSight landed in a spot called Elysium Planitia, which is relatively flat and close to the Martian equator. The roughly 20-foot-long lander will not move around like a rover.

NASA/JPL-CaltechShortly after NASA’s InSight lander touched down on the Martian surface on November 26, the robot took this photo. The image shows the spacecraft’s instrument deck and the flat plains of Elysium Planitia.

Instead, it’s more like an unmanned research station. InSight scientists hope the lander will give them a better understanding of how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed.

NASA-JPL Caltech-Lockheed Martin

InSight is equipped with a suite of sensitive instruments to gather data. Those tools “require a spacecraft that sits still and carefully places its instruments on the Martian surface,” according to NASA.

InSight will hammer a heat probe up to 16 feet deep into the Martian soil. The process will take about two months.